


Destiny

by Tammany



Category: Doctor Who, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fate & Destiny, Love, M/M, Meddling with time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 10:52:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6235819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is because I was getting antsy for a happy, mushy outcome for Mycroft and Greg, and once the Doctor got involved it got a bit tangled and timey-wimey, but it resolved well in the end. Hope you like it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Destiny

Mycroft Holmes knew many things kept secret from the rest of the world. He knew who slept with whom in not only the overt British Government—but in the far more covert and labyrinthine civil service. He knew who held the keys to the exceedingly private and little-known privy in the basement of the House of Commons—the privy-privy, as it were. He knew about the time Margaret Thatcher put a ladder in her tights mere moments before she was supposed to meet Gorbachev, and he knew exactly which secret service agent had valiantly given up his own personal pair to ensure the Iron Lady’s dignity was preserved. He knew the names of all the Queen’s corgis—and the names the Queen’s household called the beasts when they behaved badly.

He knew about UNIT.

And Torchwood.

And he knew about the Doctor.

So he was unsurprised to find himself confronted with a slim, energetic man of a certain age, dressed like a punk rocker of Mycroft’s youth, brandishing a crimson electric guitar.

“Twelve, I presume?” he said, blandly. “Or is it Thirteen?”

“Yes.”

Mycroft blinked owlishly, adding one more detail to his mental files on the Time Lord. “Tea?”

“Na-na-na,” the man said in a prickly Scottish accent. Then, more drawn out, “Bigger things than that.”

Mycroft’s heart sank. “Oh, please—if you’re here for a serious reason, you’ve come to the wrong man. Or woman. Go bother Lethbridge-Stewart. She’s your handler, for God’s sake.”

The damned man laughed, eyes crinkling, and he leaned against the blue box standing in the middle of the Stranger’s Room of the Diogenes, and picked out a restless, fretful line of guitar music. “Wrong. I doubt she’d be any use at all.”

Mycroft flopped inelegantly into one of the club chairs, overcome with dismay. “Please tell me this isn’t one of those ugly little knots of paradox that can’t be handled with a quick lie-down.”

“Destiny,” the Doctor intoned, with amused portent. “Your doom has come upon you—and all that jazz.”

Mycroft gave him an evil scowl. “I don’t do ‘doom.’ As for ‘destiny,’ go bother my little brother. He’d be enraptured to know he has one.”

“Actually, he’d detest it.”

“Really?” Mycroft was embarrassed to realize he’d perked up a tad. “Do tell…Why ever would Sherlock loathe having a destiny?”

“Bees. Sussex. Life on a farm.”

“You’re not serious….”

The Doctor laughed. Mycroft shivered, thinking suddenly that Sherlock almost certainly would not like any destiny this man served up. “Sussex?”

“And hives. Monographs on royal jelly.”

“Good God.” He shook his head. “How the mighty are fallen.”

“Quite. Not that it matters. Today it’s your own doom.”

Mycroft made a grim little moue of distaste. “Please let it not involve any sort of hive insect.”

“Not even an ant farm? I would expect you to find ant farms fascinating.”

“I did. When I was three.” Mycroft tidied an invisible wrinkle off of his lapel. “One matures. Or I do—Sherlock being another matter entirely.”

“No ants, then.” The man tucked one foot back, bracing it against the blue box. He settled his guitar on his knee and curled over it. For the next five minutes he played.

He was quite good, Mycroft noted. But then he’d been a good penny whistle player once, too, if Mycroft recalled correctly.

The music was unsettling—alternately unhappy and edgy, and joyful and majestic.

“What is that?”

“This? Little piece I made up.”

“You?”

The man smirked. There was really no way around it. He smirked. Mycroft narrowed his eyes, drilling holes in the Gallifreyan menace. “Has it a title?”

“Dueling Destinies.”

Mycroft scoffed. “Oh, do stop. Seriously…I’m not playing.” His chin rose, and he turned away, making a great show of shaking open the daily London Times. “Go along now—and don’t come back unless you’re ready to communicate meaningfully.”

There was an irked little huff, and a sense of motion. The blue box wheeped and wailed.

Mycroft sighed, feeling uneasily as though he should have let the man tell him what he wanted to tell him. He wasn’t left to regret his decision long, though—second later there was renewed wheeping and wailing. He forced himself not to look, though peripheral vision insisted on recognizing the box—and the man emerging, now dressed in a sleek black jacket much like Mycroft’s own Crombie over a faintly Victorian shirt and slim black trousers.

“Thought better of your choice?”

Mycroft shrugged. “Perhaps. Have you thought better of making me play twenty questions to learn anything?”

“You’re worse than your brother.” The Doctor sounded peeved.

“Impossible,” Mycroft said, calmly. “For example, there is no way I will end up in Sussex raising bees.”

“True.”

“So what will I be doing?”

After too long a silence, Mycroft gave in and turned his head. His eyes met the Doctor’s: pale blue to pale blue.

“That depends.” The Doctor gave a tight, death’s head grin.

“On what?”

“How you choose.”

Mycroft blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You are an exceptional person, Mr. Holmes. You see, you get to determine the course of the next thousand or so years.”

“Me?” Mycroft preened. “My position in government, I take it?”

“Not at all.” The Doctor smirked again, nearly salaciously. “Far less…abstract, I’m afraid.”

“Then what?”

“You will either leave your club today, locate a fellow called ‘Lestrade,’ and kiss him…”

Mycroft felt his stomach surge and retreat, leaving a hollow feeling behind. “Or what?”

“Or you won’t.”

“And?” Mycroft snapped the newspaper back into regular folds. “Good God, man. You can’t expect me to believe the history of the next thousand years depends on me kissing or not-kissing Greg Lestrade! Ridiculous.”

“But true…”

Mycroft huffed, then went sly. “This isn’t one of those things where no matter what anyone does, they are part of history? I mean, I could pull the same sort of stunt—walk up to you and say, ‘Either you will go rescue this woman and history will go one way, or you won’t and it will go another,’ and the obvious truth is that would be the only thing that would change.”

The Doctor gave him an evil look. “I don’t rescue people. Especially not women.”

Mycroft rolled his eyes. “Neither true—nor to the point. Is this just one of those difference-that-makes-no-difference games?”

“No.” The man’s growling accent was thicker than before, and he ran long, slim fingers through a shag of hair Mycroft could only envy. “It’s perfectly real. One version leads to a thousand-year golden age for Earth. The other way—not so much. I was going to stay out of it, but—it seemed a shame, really.”

Something seemed sad and reckless in the Doctor’s eyes. Not that Mycroft cared about such things, except insofar as they helped him deduce the details of his reality. But here and now, of course, the Doctor was his reality—and the Doctor seemed forlorn, somehow.

“Where’s your companion,” Mycroft asked, as though it were a trivial matter.

The Doctor flinched.

Flinched!

Mycroft ran this through everything he knew about the Doctor.

Someone, then, had died, he thought. Someone the Doctor cared about. A companion?

“You shouldn’t be wasting time here,” he said. “Go. Save her.”

The Doctor snarled something in so dense an accent Mycroft couldn’t follow at all, spun on one foot, ducked into the Tardis, and then the whoop and wail began again.

Seconds later Mycroft was alone.

“Well, that was unexpected,” Mycroft said to empty air.

He leaned back in the club chair, trying to decide what that had all been about. Destiny—depending on what he chose. Depending on whether he found and kissed Gregory Lestrade.

Ridiculous.

Insane.

It quite honestly was nothing Mycroft had ever thought of doing. Mycroft did not waste time thinking about utter impossibilities. Inspector Lestrade—Agent Lestrade—was handsome, responsible, charming, an insanely good Sherlock-wrangler…and nothing more. Mycroft was Mycroft—largely celibate, entirely un-entangled, and only fractionally aware of his colleagues as sexual beings, because, really, it wasn’t worth the inevitable anguish.

He wouldn’t even have thought of it if the Doctor had not suggested it.

Which meant the Doctor was meddling.

Which almost certainly meant it wasn’t half the balderdash Mycroft thought it was—but instead something that was driving the madman in the box…

A box which announced its return with the predictable moaning howl.

“Back in your moving castle,” Mycroft said amiably, as the Doctor stepped out of the box in a third outfit, this with a hoodie Sherlock would have envied. His hands were shoved deep in the pockets of the zip-up jacket.

He frowned. “It’s not a castle,” he grumbled. “It’s a Tardis.”

“Yes, yes. ‘Time and Relative blah-blah-blah. I do know. The question is, what brings you back?”

“The Tardis, of course,” the Doctor quipped.

“Don’t be any stupider than you must be.” The truth was, the man was both clever and largely an unknown, making him a rare and delightful event in Mycroft’s life: a challenge. Someone he had to break a sweat to figure out. “You really are bothered by this, aren’t you? Third time back in less than an hour my time—and in days, if not weeks your time.” He meditated. “Yes—something is driving you, and it’s not simple at all. What happens to me if I don’t go out?”

“Nothing.”

Mycroft frowned. “I either go out—and find and kiss Lestrade—or I stay in, and nothing in particular happens?”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t die?”

The Doctor gave him a look—all bristling eyebrows and craggy frown. “You’re a proper laugh riot, aren’t you? No. You don’t die.”

“Which way do we get this wonderful golden age—no, no. Let me work it out.” He ran it through and said, “It has to be if I go kiss Lestrade. Otherwise you’d just leave me here and let things run their usual course.”

The Doctor growled. “Oh, stop it. It could as easily be I find a non-golden future more interesting. Unless a golden age for Earth would be a disaster for everyone else. It’s not easy. It’s not a puzzle. It’s a choice. Go. Stay. Kiss. No-kiss. Up to you.”

Mycroft studied him, then said, knowing in his gut that his deduction was correct. “And which will you choose? What romance has you wobbling on the edge of a razor blade?”

The bony chin set. The cheeks were suddenly more drawn. “I already chose.”

“No, you did not.”

“I should know, man!” The Doctor reared back like an affronted gander, all beak and bad temper.

“Don’t be stupid,” Mycroft shot back. “You may think you’ve made a choice, but your intuition knows you haven’t, or you’d not be gnawing on my situation the way you are. You're half-mad with it. You wouldn’t be if it didn’t relate, somehow.”

“She’s dead already,” the Doctor snarled. “Been dead since I met her. What am I to do about that?”

The silence fell.

“Ah,” Mycroft said, softly. “You can’t go back and undo the death, then?”

A growl was all the answer he got. He sighed.

“Well, then,” he said. He found himself reaching for his pocket square, as though to wipe away tears. There were none—but, he realized, there might have been. There was a melancholy air in the room that weighed on his heart oddly. “So—you’re suggesting that mine, at least, isn’t already deceased?”

“It does make things substantially easier to resolve,” the Doctor drawled, looking away. “Not that it’s any difference to me, but…”

“No. Of course not. Too much on the mortal scale for the likes of you.”

“Precisely.”

“And it’s not as though we’ve met, or that you care for me.”

“Mmmm. Spoilers.”

Mycroft rolled his eyes, ignoring the sudden shake in the other man’s voice. “I see. That kind of thing. Time.”

The Doctor spread his hands wide, fingers wide—a showman’s gesture. “Rather my area of specialization, time is.”

“So I’m told.” Mycroft’s voice was not in any sense indulgent. He considered. “I suppose I could at least go out and find the Inspector,” he said, more to himself than to the Doctor. “No need to actually act on your suggestion, after all.”

“No need,” the Doctor agreed, with entirely unconvincing innocence.

Mycroft nodded—but was still considering things—weighing things. Solving things.

“If she’s already dead, then that’s off your to-do list,” he said, contemplating the parameters he recognized. “But what’s to keep her from not being dead, now that it’s all sorted?”

The Doctor frowned—this time in some confusion. “What?”

“Your…whoever,” Mycroft said, fluttering his fingers in the air to suggest something enjoyable and frivolous and personal. “Your dead person. If she’s dead, then that’s all taken care of, no?”

“NO—I mean, yes. I mean—“ The Doctor frowned and frowned. “She’s been dead all along.”

“Yes, yes—timey-wimey. I do understand. I’m just trying to think timey-wimey myself,” Mycroft grumbled. “She’s dead, which means whatever was supposed to happen, happened. But why does she have to stay dead: do you know of anything that will fall apart if you bring her back after?”

Without a moment to think, the Doctor growled out, “Dead is dead, man!”

Mycroft sniffed. “Don’t be a fool. Dead is…conditional. A lot depends on just how dead a dead person really is. If I understand correctly, that’s even more true for your lot than for me and mine, and I assure you, me and mine have made very good use of conditional death. It comes in handy in so many dire circumstances.”

The Doctor blinked at him. And blinked. And then, slowly, his head cocked, and his eyes unfocused, and Mycroft knew he was resolving something in that ancient and infinite mind.

“Ah…”

“Don’t mind me. Just a little bird chirping in your ear.”

“She’s stored,” the Doctor said—and as he came out of his haze, he smiled.

Mycroft felt his heart contract, pause—and wake again with a heaving pulse. To be smiled at like that!  Good God!

“It will work, then?” he asked, diffidently, suddenly thinking some undead woman somewhere in time was a very lucky woman.

“Perhaps,” the Doctor said, but his smile suggested there was really no question. “It’s going to involve getting into a lost library, past immortal monsters in the shadows. I’ll have to rescue her from a hidden chamber, and then bring her back to life. But—it will be an adventure.” His lean body quivered like a greyhound’s. He whirled back toward the Tardis—and stopped. He met Mycroft’s eye.

“Go,” he said.

“You’re outright suggesting?” Mycroft smiled, having already made the choice the Doctor so clearly wanted.

The Doctor shrugged. “I’m suggesting,” he agreed, grinning. “And if time gives a damn—well, bugger time if it can’t take a joke.”

Something fond hovered between the two.

“Good luck,” Mycroft said, almost tenderly. “Find her. Be happy.”

“And you—take that walk. I promise—it will be worth your while. And Earth will be the better for it.”

Mycroft nodded.

He walked down Pall Mall, later, and then south toward the Thames until he came to NSY. He waited under the rotating triangle, hands in his pockets, scarf neat around his neck, as he contemplated what had happened, and what it meant.

He could only believe that kissing Greg Lestrade would make him a happier, wiser man—and a better version of the British Government than he had been previously.

He hoped so, anyway.

When Lestrade came striding out at half-past five that evening, Mycroft stepped forward and put the theory to the test. One step, two. Eyes met. Lestrade froze in place, eyes growing wide as he read the intention in Mycroft’s. Then they were face to face. Then they were kissing.

The mental echo of a whooping, wailing box echoed in Mycroft’s mind, then faded as the intensity of the kiss over-ruled all else.

When they finally came up for air, Lestrade said, faintly, “What was that all about?”

Mycroft smiled at him, and said, “Just saving the world, Inspector. I am assured by the best of sources, I am welcoming in a Golden Age for Earth.”

“You don’t say,” Lestrade said, half sark, half laughter. Then he leaned in and said, softly, “Wanna aim for platinum instead of gold?”

Mycroft was too happy with the outcome to argue over metallurgic analogies…

*****

“You’ve been a clever boy, then, haven’t you?” River Song said, lying contentedly in the Doctor’s lap when she’d been brought through the fine-tuned transport of the Library, then hurried to the safety of the Tardis. “Figuring out that you could bring me back like that.”

“I’m afraid I had a hint,” the Doctor said, pulling her close.

“A hint? From whom?”

He grinned. “Believe it or not, from Mycroft Holmes.”

“The Mycroft?” she asked, eyes wide. “Mycroft of…”

“Yes. ‘Greg and Mycroft.’”

She preened. “Well, then! That does make our relationship look rather special, doesn’t it? With them backing it!”

He smiled, thinking how much more likely it had been that Mycroft Holmes would never have left his club chair that afternoon. “Quite,” he said. “So—there we are. Two pairs of immortal lovers. Destinies written in the stars.”

River, who seldom worried too much about destiny or the place of her relationship in stellar terms (except insofar as mad leaps out of airlocks were concerned), squirmed and dragged him in for a cuddle. “Come here, you. Give me a kiss, why don’t you?”

And the Doctor smiled, and complied. After all, if Mycroft and Greg could manage “happily ever after,” there was no reason he could see that he and River shouldn’t.


End file.
